


only your savage heart

by Ohamour



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, M/M, Size Difference, Size Kink, a little bit of internalized homophobia, mildly slow burn, mostly tv show, post season five, with bits of the books
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-03-09 04:12:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18909316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ohamour/pseuds/Ohamour
Summary: Six scars.Six slices, sinking into his skin.He’s only touched them once, right after waking, when they were wounds still gaping, unclosed and unbleeding.A dead thing does not bleed, after all.Davos had cloaked him, dressed him, sat him by the fire and whispered about the Red Woman, about burnt hair and prayers to a God Jon does not believe in.He wonders why that didn’t matter.Or, Jon comes back and some things change while others stay the same.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much just an excuse to write Jormund smut, but I like a little burn before the flame, so we get a bit of plot to go with it.  
> Mixes book and show canon, but mostly show, some things are different, Jon is a bit younger than portrayed in the show, as I think it suits him trying to find himself and his role as a leader. There's some of his warging/dreams in here that are mentioned in the books, but I'm not sure how much I'll go into it, yet.  
> Sansa and co. will be along for the ride, but this will mainly be focused on Jon/Tormund and the build up of their relationship, angst and smut and misunderstandings and more smut, because I mostly just want Jon to get railed by the big wildling, ngl.  
> In this story, Jon doesn't just come back to life and try to leave the Night's Watch, so things play out a bit differently in that regard.
> 
> Warnings: Ramsay Bolton is his own warning, past non-con, violence, etc... some homophobia and Jon's struggles to come to terms with what he wants. A little bit of Brienne/Tormund and Jon/Ygritte.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

                Six scars.

 

Six slices, sinking into his skin.

He’s only touched them once, right after waking, when they were wounds still gaping, unclosed and unbleeding.

A dead thing does not bleed, after all.

Davos had cloaked him, dressed him, sat him by the fire and whispered about the Red Woman, about burnt hair and prayers to a God Jon does not believe in.

He wonders why that didn’t matter.

 

 

 

 

                There’s a knock on his door, a quick rap of heavy knuckles. Jon stares at the crackling fire, wondering if his skin looks grey or if it’s simply the shadows. Watches it tinge orange, red, yellow, flicker blue and black and blinks corpses and grey bodies and blue eyes in every other blink.

“Should I be thanking this God of Light, Jon Snow? Or be worried about him?”

Jon blinks, his gaze shifting up, slowly, feels like he’s stuck in syrup, slowed down to a slow drip.  Tormund watches him, his hair a wild flame. He thinks of Davos’ whispers, of burnt hair and bloody cloths, the Red Woman’s hands peeling off his deadness.

He looks to Ghost, who blinks tiredly and unconcerned at Tormund before setting his head back down to sleep. Thinks of the lap of his rough tongue on his skin when Jon woke with that first full gasp from dead lungs, like the wolf was making sure the body before him was still his boy.

Jon has no words and Tormund tilts his head, and even here, even now, he is more wild than Jon has ever let himself be. His name weighs on him, his burden, his blessing, his bones. Brother. Commander. Stark. Snow. Son of the father, no mother, no home. And now—

Now he is a dead boy breathing through six stab wounds, bled dry and still blue-tinted beneath his nails like death is a shroud Jon is slowly slipping.

Tormund kneels in front of him, a creaking tree being felled in slow hacks. He says nothing, but his eyes are blue, so blue, even in the shifting darkness.

 _Jon,_ he whispers, his hand hot and heavy and wide on Jon’s thigh. _Jon._

 _I am not Jon Snow,_ Jon thinks, _I am a dead thing,_ but he feels the seeping heat of Tormund’s palm like it’s hotter than the lick of the flames in the fire in front of him. It reminds him of the hot springs beneath Winterfell, that almost too hot water, that almost too hot steam, the filling burn of it on every inhale.

Tormund’s hand presses harder, harder, and Jon thinks of the force it takes to kill a man and wonders if he would stay dead this time.

“Little Crow,” Tormund says, his voice rough-edged as his hand slides up to the edges of Jon’s shirt, pulls it free from his pants like he’s unwinding a spooling thread.

Jon says nothing, realises he has said nothing, _felt_ nothing, since Davos cloaked him, dressed him like a child and let the Red Woman watch, silent with some sick sort of awe in her pale face.

Tormund’s fingers are warm and rough, and he’s saying something, his lips moving beneath his beard. “Wanted to burn you,” he says roughly, low enough Jon can barely hear. “Wanted to put your body on a pyre and give you a proper death, not on a table, not laid out, naked and still bloody.”

 _She washed your wounds,_ Davos had whispered, his touch like a father’s, an easy kindness, a commanding softness Jon knew once. _She cut your hair._

“That woman—” Tormund cuts off, his fingers knotting into Jon’s shirt before easing, before he’s pulling Jon forward, even on his knees it’s easy enough for him to shove the furs from Jon’s shoulders, to tug Jon’s shirt up and over his head.

It’s shameless, brazen, too bold, Jon thinks. Too intimate, he’s a Stark and a Lord Commander. He’s a man—

 _A boy playing at being a man,_ he thinks but he does not stop Tormund, not even when the other man’s eyes sink down Jon’s chest as Jon rests back into his chair, boneless, bloodless, and blighted.

Tormund looks at him, no, not at _him,_ at his chest, at six scars, at six swords cut into his skin. He says nothing and Jon isn’t entirely sure he remembers how to make his tongue work.

“I wanted to burn you,” Tormund says, like it’s more to himself than anything else. “Burn you so you couldn’t open your eyes. Burn you so they wouldn’t turn blue.”

Jon thinks about Tormund beside him, on the boat, on the battlefield, thinks about the way his thigh pressed hot against his as they watched the dead rise on the bloody shores of Hardhome.

 _I am not that,_ he thinks, but can’t get his throat to work. Whatever Melisandre did, whatever her God is, Jon is not _that._ He _can’t_ be that—

“Don’t let me be that,” he whispers, croaks out. Voice rough and uneven, sounding young and so small to his own ears it makes his insides twist. Thinking of broken bodies and dead flesh, of snapping teeth and sharp bone-claws.

Of the dead, rising on a shore front, their eyes glowing blue.

Tormund breathes out, hard and hot, something shifts on his face, in the blue-tinted shadow of his eyes... Jon doesn’t know what it is. Pain. Anger. Sadness.

He has no name for it.

Tormund’s hand rises between them as slowly as time moves in the moment; a dripping thing. His fingers are warm and rough on Jon’s skin, brushing the edge of a slowly-scabbing stab-wound on his stomach.

Jon feels it, like he feels the heat on Tormund’s arm on his thigh, the heavy muscle weighing him down, he thinks it might be the first real thing he’s felt since he woke up gasping, woke up naked, woke up a half-dead thing feeling his heart stuttering back to life.

Tormund touches each scar, touches Jon’s skin, his fingers rough-tipped, his eyes following like he’s tracing the edges of mountains, of rivers, tracing roads and names; mapping his way across the death-scape of Jon’s skin.

Jon lets him.

When he reaches the one on Jon’s chest, the one from Olly, he pauses, his eyes shifting up to Jon’s face again. They’re the same height like this, Jon realises, Tormund’s eyes on his, his fingers on his chest until his fingers become his hand become the flat weight of his palm pressed to Jon’s skin. It’s hot, wide, covers more of his skin than he imagined a hand could.

Jon lets him.

“You are alive, little crow. I feel it.”

Jon’s heart thumps, trips, double-times in his chest and falls into the rhythm of Tormund’s pulse, steady beneath his palm.

“Burn me,” he whispers. “Promise me.”

Tormund says nothing for so long Jon thinks he didn’t speak at all, but when his answer comes, it’s in the tip of his fingers on the scar over his heart.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

              “Let me do it,” Tormund says the next day, sprawled out on the bench seat beside Jon, ignoring Edd’s scowl across from him. “Should’ve fuckin’ killed them all that first night and been done with it.”

Edd’s mouth opens, ready to defend the choice made, ready to tell the Wildling that their brothers may have betrayed them but that they are still _brothers_ , still men, still deserving off a final judgment before they meet the fate they sent Jon to at sword-point.

“You can’t,” Jon interrupts, picking at the watery stew in front of him. “If I were to let a Wildling kill my brothers… the tensions are too high, even if they accept my choice to bring you all here, how can I force them watch our brothers murdered—”

“Your _brothers_?” Tormund sneers, his eyes narrowing on Jon. “They tried to kill you, Jon!”

 _They did kill me,_ he thinks, but just shakes his head again, ignoring the impatience, the violence that sits in Tormund’s face. “I have to be the one to do it.”

No one speaks, no one offers another path, his brothers, those willing to die for him, to fight for him, to defend the empty shell of his body, say nothing. Davos meets his eyes across the table and in them Jon sees a resigned agreement. Jon is right, these men… they trust him, follow him, die for him… but they are the Night’s Watch and Tormund is a Wildling first and Jon’s— Jon’s friend second.

Tormund huffs, his body tense as he shakes his head, the bench creaks as he pushes up, jolts as he steps over it. The door slams and Jon ignores the thud of it—

Ignores the cold of his leg where Tormund’s knee had pressed against him.

 

 

                “They don’t deserve this death,” Tormund says behind him, pushing into Jon’s room, no less angry than he seemed hours ago.

“I’m _hanging_ them,” Jon states, his eyes closing, not opening them again until Tormund is in front of him, looking down at him, his eyes burning, his mouth tight. “As traitors. As the Watch has done for generations.”

“You give them voices, string them up and let them speak as if they have a right to—”

“ _They do,_ ” he sighs, his body tired and sore, feels like he’s barely being contained by it, like his skin is a tether that his bones are trying to slip free of. “They did what they thought was right, the same thing I have done, the same thing you would—”

“Not the fuckin’ same, I look a man in the eye when I—”

“They did.” It slips out of him, he isn’t sure he means to say it, isn’t sure he even remembered it until right then. “Each man… Olly. They stepped up to me and looked me in the eye and stuck their swords in me.”

Tormund stares at him, his chest shifting, long and heavy breaths, his lip curls up—

Jon thinks of the man on the rocky shores of Hardhome, the sneering twist of his voice cut off when he said, _do you suck his cock—_ Thinks of the arc of Tormund’s body, the shifting mass of his anger, the weight it takes to break a man open and turn him into a bloody mess of broken bones and beaten pulp.

He envies Tormund’s freedom in his anger, the ability to gather it, to use it, to bring his arms up and let it loose.

But when Tormund stands straighter, his anger is not what he expected, his hand comes up and he curls it into the collar of Jon’s shirt.

Jon says nothing, but feels his heart trip, feels it come to life beneath his rib cage; feels Tormund’s breath on his face in angry puffs, staring down at him; Jon swallows, feels his lips part—

Tormund makes some noise in his chest, something Jon’s never heard a man make, his hand coming off Jon as suddenly as he took hold of him. His chest shifting as he steps away, growling out:

“Don’t listen to them, whatever it is they have to say, you fuckin’ hear me, Jon Snow?”

“They’re my—”

“ _Murderers_ ,” Tormund snarls. “They fuckin’ murdered you, little crow. They slipped in the night like snakes—" He cuts off and lifts his hand, his finger in Jon’s face. “I came— _we_ came back for _you_ , even if it was just for your body. That’s what you mean to these people, to _my_ people. You weren’t here, you don’t know—”

“I was _dead—_ ”

“Aye, Jon Snow, you were _dead._ And I had men building a pyre for your body. You were fuckin’ dead and cold on that table and I stood there and watched that woman strip you, watched her clean your wounds and burn your hair and every second I waited I thought, _don’t let his eyes open—_ ”

Jon swallows, Tormund steps closer, is breath hot on his face, his anger a heavy weight binding Jon still as he looks up, meets Tormund’s eyes and tries not to let the hurt show.

“ _Don’t let them open. Do not let them be blue_.”

Jon exhales, Tormund’s jaw tenses beneath his beard. “I would have _burnt_ you. I was ready to— do you understand? If I had—”

It hangs between them, Jon hears the words like Tormund pressed them against his skin.

_If I had, you wouldn’t be here right now._

“They’ll say they were right, that you deserved it, that you betrayed them and your brothers. You let them speak, Jon, and they’ll make you believe it, too. You’re too good, boy, they don’t deserve you.”

He doesn’t move, not even when Tormund steps around him, not even when the door shuts, not until his bones are stiff and his fingers are cold and he thinks about that first full gasp of his dead lungs and how cold his body had been, naked on that table.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

                After, when they’re dead. When their bodies are burnt. After, when Jon has watched Olly’s skin turn black until there’s nothing left of him at all, he says nothing as Tormund follows him back into Castle black, says nothing as the older man becomes a looming shadow, says nothing when his palm cups the side of Jon’s neck and brings his forehead down to touch Jon’s.

“Stupid boy,” he growls. “My stupid, pretty little crow.”

There’s a knock and Tormund steps away as Jon clears his throat, tearing his eyes away from Tormund’s to call out a rough, _enter._

Edd steps in, holding a bundle of swords that Jon knows the sharp tip of each. He drops them onto the small table in a clang of cold metal.

“I didn’t think it right to put these back in the armoury,” he says, looking between them. “Thorne’s sword is—”

“Mine,” Tormund says, his mouth curling into a grin, “I’ll take the fucker’s sword.”

Edd’s mouth opens, but when Jon laughs, it snaps shut again, his eyes darting to the sound of Jon’s laughter.

“Seems fitting, no?” Tormund grins at Jon, lifting the blade. “His sword going to a Wildling?”

Edd’s lips twitch, he looks to Jon, seems to say _what have you brought into our castle, brother,_ but it’s not outrage or betrayal, just humour and acceptance.

It reminds him, suddenly, of his father watching from the balcony in the courtyard at Winterfell, as they played with their Direwolves; he’d caught Ned’s eyes, saw the fondness, that gentle bit of worry, the tilt of his mouth telling Jon, _what did you convince me to let you keep, my boy?_

But then Tormund is laughing, that deep belly-full laugh and Jon gets swept up inside of it, swallowed down in the moment and there’s no deadness left inside of him, no stiffness, no coldness.

“Imagine his face now, Jon.”

Jon does and it makes him smile in some sick way, even with Thorne’s last words hanging in his head, round his neck like the noose was tightening on his own throat.

_I fought, I lost. Now I rest. But you, Lord Snow, you'll be fighting their battles forever._

He thinks of Tormund’s hand on the side of it instead, of his voice, _my stupid, pretty little crow—_

He drinks, watches Tormund, watches Edd and his brother’s who join them later, drink and fill themselves with ale and fire-heat. The room growing warmer, the night darker… watches their layers come off, their cheeks turn ruddy and warm, watches Tormund’s shoulders, so rarely seen not burdened by skins and heavy furs.

Jon looks away, drinks and stretches out his fingers one by one, wondering if they would feel cold to anyone else or only to him.

 

 

                Jon dreams of a red cloak, of red hair and flames, dreams of wolves and dogs snarling and biting and colliding like the first violent impact of a cavalry charge.

Jon dreams he peels his skin back and finds a whole other boy beneath.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

                For a second, he swears the woman below him is Catelyn Stark, for a moment he’s back in Winterfell, for a blink he’s ten and a brother running through hallways and out into the courtyard before a woman reminds him he’s a bastard child and nothing more.

And then the woman turns, and it’s no woman but a girl he knows, or knew, or maybe didn’t, not at all.

Sansa stands below him, muddied and dirtied and looking more like the girl Arya was than who Sansa Stark was before. Wild, bruised, untethered from her name.

But then, he’s never known much, not really.

Sansa says _Stark_ and _Winterfell_ and _home_ like Jon has one, like Jon had lost one, like Jon could go _back_ to one.

Sansa says _brother_ and Jon aches with voices he thought he’d never hear again. Robb and Rickon, Bran and— and Arya. G _ods,_ what he wouldn’t do to see her again. _Alive,_ he thinks, prays to a light in the dark, to the sweep of the Red Woman’s cloak over white snow, to the fire in his room when he’s alone with nothing but memories and fingers that still look blue-tipped.

He sees something similar in Sansa now, wonders how many nights she spent in her own home, the cruelty of being in her own home, staring into a fire with cold-tipped fingers and praying for the ghosts of her own family to come back to life, to bring back the warmth so easily lost in stone.

He remembers the winds in Winterfell, how they could sound like voices and cries, like laughter and song, too. He can't imagine being there alone.

Tormund sits beside him through it all, his larger thigh pressed against his own, listens to Sansa fill in the years since Jon took the Black, fill in the death and the loss like it was nearly a story that happened to someone else.

She falters only once, only for a moment, when she tells him about a cruel boy and a head on a spike.

 _I almost did it,_ she says, _I stepped forward, I knew I could— Father was right there and I—_

Brienne of Tarth is a woman unlike any other. She moves like a man, taller than Tormund, nearly as broad. She lingers at Sansa’s side like she’s afraid to let her out of her sight. Like she did once, and she’ll never do it again.

She lays a hand on Sansa’s shoulder, though neither of them miss Sansa’s flinch, Brienne keeps her hand steady and still, pale and wide on the dark of Sansa’s shoulder.

It reminds him of Tormund, though when he looks at the man when he can finally pull his eyes away from Sansa, Tormund’s eyes are on Brienne of Tarth like he hasn’t seen anything quite like her in his entire life.

Jon looks at his— his friend, the man he fights beside, the man who brought his Wildlings into Castle Black just so he could get to Jon’s body… the one who knelt, traced his scars, touched his heart and reminded him he was still alive…

_My pretty little crow._

He knows who Tormund is, he reminds himself, wild and free and unbound by rules. He tells himself that he is _wrong_ in those moments, those sudden, shameful moments where Tormund’s heat and body and hands are a slow dripping thing that crawls down his back like sweat. An idea that gathers, slips along the notches of his spine… pools low and swells inside of him like an ignored hunger.

He tells himself, in those quiet moments after Tormund has left Jon’s side, or his chambers, in those moments where an itch settles low in his stomach, between his hips, sinks lower still. That boyhood itch to take himself in hand and—

 _No,_ he thinks, _No._ He will not think of it. Those thoughts exist only in the night, in the moments between waking and sleep, in the quiet, empty dark of his own bed. There in one blink and gone in the next.

Tormund looks at Brienne of Tarth and Jon turns back to his sister, to the cold of her soft fingers curled around his own.

“Tell me about Ramsay Bolton,” he says, and doesn’t miss the coldness in Sansa’s eyes.

 

 

        

                  He dreams about the wind that night, howling through empty hallways, footsteps following him as castle halls turn to muddy hills and footsteps turn to boots, to thunderous marching, a thousand booted men following in his wake until they vanish, until there's nothing but mud and blood and a man in front of him calling his name.

 

 

* * *

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blown away by the comments last chapter! Thank you all so much! Hope you like this one just as much!

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

                They’ve never been close.

But he watches Sansa stroke her fingers through Ghost’s fur, watches her hand sink into the thick white pelt, cross-legged and quiet, looking younger than her sixteen years.

He wonders if he looks the same to her, if she sees the boy he was in moments, in the shift of a turning head, in the crack of a voice, or if he was removed enough from her girlhood periphery that Jon Snow, Lord Commander, _bastard brother,_ is someone new entirely.

Sansa Stark, _little lady of Winterfell_ , never had much time for Jon Snow back then.

“I still dream about her sometimes.”

Jon blinks, pulling himself out of his thoughts and hugging his furs cloak tighter around his body. Sansa wears only her dress, still muddied at the hem; he looks at the fire, and wonders if he should call for more wood or if it’s just him.

“Sorry?”

Sansa leans forward, burying her face in Ghost’s side, her voice muffled and soft and sad. “ _Lady._ ”

 _Oh,_ Jon thinks, looking at Ghost, who lazes beneath Sansa as if she’s a part of him already. Like it hasn’t been two years since they saw her last. Back when Ghost was the runt of a litter divided between six children.

And Lady had been the first lost; a penance, the reparation of a cruel queen-mother and her cruel boy-prince.

He can’t imagine a world without Ghost at his side, at his hand, trotting in his footsteps like an inverse shadow.

 _I would rather die first,_ he thinks, _let Ghost live longer than me._

Except he _has_ , he realises, and Ghost has not left his side since. The heavy weight of his direwolf across his legs each night in sleep. The lap of a tongue, a long whine, a cold snout and hot breath when Jon had risen— stumbled off that table like a newborn colt.

He wonders whose shadow is whose, really.

“It’s silly,” she says, her mouth quirking a little at him when she lifts her head. “I used to dream I was— well, I mean— I used to have these dreams…”

Jon says nothing, watching Sansa, her face half buried in Ghost’s fur, turning her cheek as if listening to the slow, steady whu-bump of his wolf’s heart.

He thinks he knows exactly what she’s going to say.

“It’s silly, never mind.”

“It’s not,” Jon says quietly, trying to find the words to offer her, he’s better at commands, _men are easier_ , he thinks, and can’t help but remember Ygritte. _You know nothing, Jon Snow._ “You dreamt of being Lady?”

Sansa looks surprised for a moment, searching his face like she’s afraid he’s poking fun, but whatever she finds in his face must convince her otherwise. She looks away, a little crease between her brows, “I— not really, I was still me, but I was her, too? I, oh, _Jon,_ it’s stupid girl dreams, but I swear I felt the dirt and the forest—” her nose wrinkles a little, face twisting. “And _blood,_ sometimes too.”

“It’s not stupid, Sansa, I do it too. With Ghost.”

She blinks up at him, sitting straighter. “You do?”

He realises he’s never spoken about it out loud, never told anyone how it feels to be wild, half-feral, tamed only by the heartbeat of a boy, echoing in his mind.

“Not just when I’m asleep, either,” Jon says, because he’s started now and Sansa is looking at him like he’s something _new,_ something _good,_ and it reminds him of the _relief_ on her face when he first really saw _her_ and not Catelyn standing in the yard of Castle Black, bruised and exhausted, more ghosts at her heels than even Jon could claim.

Jon may have been the one to rise from that table, half-dead and still cold, but he thinks Sansa has more unburied dead than the Wall has men; they just aren’t all living things. Bruises, scars, an unmade girl holding herself together in all the fine, perfect stitches she learnt in childhood.

 _We’re Starks,_ she’d said. _Brother._

“You could try it with him,” he offers, wondering even as he says it if Ghost would let her, but by the way the wolf lets her lay on him, Jon imagines she might be able to. “I don’t know how to explain it to you, though, sometimes it’s just dreams, sometimes if I focus on him enough, I see things. Sometimes I’m more him than I am me.”

_But who is Jon Snow?_

A half-dead boy with cold-tipped fingers, Lord Commander, Wildling-lover, Bastard-son, Boy-killer.

Olly was younger than Bran, and he hung him. Watched him burn. And felt nothing.

_Stupid, pretty little crow._

“I wouldn’t even know how to try…” Sansa strokes her hand through Ghost’s fur, her body nearly hidden behind the bulk of the wolf. “You wouldn’t mind?”

He finds it strange to be the one suddenly in possession of something Sansa Stark does not have after a childhood spent as the one always reaching. Finds it strange, here, now, dead and back to life, boy-betrayed, boy-risen— now, _Brother_ , now _Stark_ , now _Sansa’s_.

“No,” he says, stretching out his fingers closer to the fire, wondering if anyone else can see the blue beneath his nails. “Just make sure you ask him, first.”

Her smile is warmer than the fire roaring at his side.

 

 

                Sansa falls asleep, slumped over Ghost’s side in a way that reminds him of Arya, ungraceful and uncaring, as wild as her direwolf.

There’s an odd echo beneath the slow beat of his own heart, he can feel it, right against his ribs, lazy and steady and a comfort that sits strangely in his chest like a lulling song. A boy listening through stone hallways to little Stark girls being sung to sleep.

He focuses on it, on Ghost, on the slow thump of three heart-beats falling into the same rhythm.

 

He wakes, hours later, heart-thumping, with tears on his lashes, an ache between his legs, an ache in his wrists, rubbed raw skin and _pain_ somewhere deep in his belly, worse than any blade pushing in.

Sansa blinks at him in the half-dark, her lashes as clumped as Jon’s own.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

               

                “You look more like a crow than ever.”

Jon looks, though he doesn’t need to, thinks he’d know the low-pitch, odd-tilt of that voice anywhere. Tormund steps up beside him, leaning against the snow-covered rampart, looking out over the north beyond the Wall stretching wide and white around them.

Jon’s draped in layers, felt ridiculous pulling on his thick Night’s Watch cloak over his bundled body, but the cold won’t leave him today and he feels like nothing more than parts on a table, a pulled apart boy trying to rearrange himself into something whole.

There’s still an ache in between his legs, a phantom bruise on his inner thighs; he hadn’t even been able to eat breakfast.

And he hasn’t seen Sansa since she slipped from his room at dawn. Hollow-footed, a whisper of wind slipping over skin; it spoke volumes, screamed at him like crows, _this is a girl that knows silence._

Tormund turns, leaning his back against the Wall instead, looking down at Jon as if there’s something to read in the pale, too-soft, _still_ too soft curve of his cheeks, betraying the boy he really is despite how many titles he sheds and cloaks himself in.

 _Kill the boy,_ Aemon had said, _Kill the boy and let the man be born._

Jon meets Tormund’s eyes, the bright-blue more alive than the endless stretch of sky behind him and in the cold quiet, in the weight of the other man’s gaze, Jon feels more aware of his own body beneath his layers: the sinew of his muscles, the lean stretch of his limbs draped and padded and hidden under an armour of titles and vows and honours like he can hide the youth of them. Like he can hide the boy’s bones beneath the Black.

 _Kill the boy,_ Aemon had said, _kill the boy—_

 _They did, they did,_ he thinks, _they left him dead in the snow._

There are men practising in the yard below, so far below the top of the Wall that the clang of their swords is like nothing more than pins dropping against stone.

Tormund’s hand comes up, plucking at the snow-damp, black mess of Jon’s furred cloak. “How are you going to fight in all this, little crow? Like a little bear cub, throwing itself against foe? Or maybe more like a crow, hm? Pecking eyes with little swords.”

Jon knocks his hand away and huffs, his lips curving, breath puffing white in front of him; Tormund smirks, his eyes crinkling just a little at the edges. “Can still peck your eyes out.”

“Ah,” he mutters, his smile crooked, his hand rising again, up along Jon’s furs, pushing in, moving layers; fingers rough-tipped and cold on Jon’s neck, sending a shiver through his spine that’s as slow as the white puff of an exhale from Jon’s lips. “There’s the boy, I know.”

It’s too quiet, the distant noises of his men so far down below are faded beneath the beat of his pulse, rising in thumping swells beneath Tormund’s fingers.

He hopes to the Gods that Tormund can’t feel it.

_You know nothing, Jon Snow._

Ygritte laughs at him, crowing with it, lit up with it, her kisses sweet and tongue even sweeter. He tries to focus on that, on her mouth, her smile, the way she guided him, even clumsy handed as he’d been.

“Do you ever stop thinking?” Tormund’s voice is teasing and low and it curls something inside of Jon’s stomach, winds it tighter and tighter, like the memory of Tormund’s hand on his shirt, gathering it up and up and up.

 _I came back wrong,_ he thinks, _I must have._

He’s never—

He wishes Tormund would stop touching him, wishes he could tell Tormund to stop, wishes he could open his mouth and tell the other man that Jon is _broken—_

 _Not broken,_ he thinks, _punctured. Dead in the snow._

Cracking at his edges like he might shatter apart. Just like the White-Walker had at Hardhome, at the sharp tip of Jon’s blade.

But it’s just a hand on his neck.

His heart beats in his chest; can feel every thump, like a war-hammer on a wood shield, full-bodied and breaking him open. He’s never been so aware of his own pulse before, not even in battle, not even naked with Ygritte—

Never been so aware of his own heart as he is now, an undead boy knowing how still it can be, silent in his undead chest.

_She stripped you, washed you, cut your hair._

_You were fuckin’ dead and cold on that table._

“ _Jon_.”

His name draws him back like a ripple moving closer and closer towards shore. He looks up, meeting Tormund’s eyes, and he isn’t sure when the other man got so close, only that he is, looming a little over him, his hand wide, so _wide_ on his neck, his thumb heavy, pushing in and up on his jaw.

There’s something in the other man’s face, no, he thinks, not his face; his eyes, caught in a dark pupil that threatens to swallow Jon whole.

Tormund’s thumb pushes in, and Jon imagines the bruise he could leave behind, the shape of his thumb on the sharp of Jon’s jaw.

Jon pulls away, swallows the sick beat of his heart and wills it silent, wills it to be that dead thing it was, still and cold in his chest.

Neither one says anything and Tormund does not follow him down; Jon isn’t sure he breathes again until he’s put both feet back onto the muck and dirty snow of Castle Black’s grounds.

 

 

 

                Tormund is not in the hall for dinner that evening. And neither is Sansa.

For a moment, Jon falters.

And then moves— sinks into the mass of his Black brothers and smiles when he’s smiled at, answers when asked, laughs when they wait for him to laugh; picks at his stew with cold fingers and does not give any thought to the coldness of his side where Tormund usually sits.

Which is strange, he thinks, so strange, to be used to something that has not even been a part of his life long. But it’s there, in the those few inches between his thigh and another man’s, a truth he isn’t sure he knows what to do with, a slow realisation of things he isn’t sure he wants to understand.

 

 

              After, when he’s smiled and joked and listened until he feels scraped raw by voices and touches and laughter, Jon makes his way back to his room.

Lady Melisandre’s door is shut, Jon thinks about knocking, about pushing in and—

And, _what,_ he thinks, _and_ _what, Jon Snow?_

He has looked at the Red Woman’s closed-door more times than he can count, thought about asking her, thought about hating her, thought about _thanking her…_ but he isn’t sure he feels anything, not really.

He feels _muted,_ like his heart is buried beneath layers, like he’s cloaked his bones and his pulse beneath furs and it’s some tell-tale heart beating in a buried box.

Sometimes, sometimes he almost wants it to stop. He’s too focused on the swell of it when it thumps louder, a fist on a door, a sword on a beaten shield, that war-hammer-blow laying him flat.

_You know nothing, Jon Snow._

But it’s not the sound of it that bothers him, not really, he knows—not the sound, but the _when_ of it that does.

He moves past the Red Woman’s door, the glow of firelight creaks out from beneath it, but Jon can’t bring himself to knock.

In bed, stripped down to one layer, weighted by blankets and Ghost’s bulk over his legs, Jon dreams as the fire crackles, glows low, pulls shadows into faces and voices and a laugh—

A laugh—

That leaves bruises, cuts his skin, pushes its way inside of his body like rabid dog’s teeth, clamping down for a bite.

 

 

                He wakes— gasping, wet-eyed and with a scream in his throat— to his own breath frosting in the air, to Ghost’s whines, the thick white of his body pinning Jon’s middle to the bed.

He works a hand free from his blankets and pushes it into Ghost’s fur, finds the heat of his hide, scratches and strokes and puffs out, _it’s all right, boy, I’m all right._

 

 

 

                Sansa finds him first, just outside his room the next morning; Ghost at her side and her fingers lost to his fur. Her eyes are bright but she looks like a pale, flame-lit sword, half-sheathed and sharp-edged.

Jon steps back, his hand still on the door. “Sansa—”

“I am more than my parts,” she bites out, as the door shuts behind her, her voice hard, and if there is any tremble in it, it’s more like the sing of metal than the crack of a chest.

“I know.”

“You _don’t,_ ” she starts, cuts off, her jaw tensing and eyes sharp. “You don’t know. But I know— I know you saw it, I don’t know how, I didn’t want you to, not _again_ —”

Jon thinks about that first night, Sansa blinking at him in the dark, both of them wet-eyed and knowing: only a wolf between them and miles and miles of ghosts.

“Is it because of Ghost?” she asks, her fingers tightening in the wolf’s fur. “Because he’s yours and not Lady?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what do you _know_ , Jon?” her voice tilts higher, sharper, the sing of a blade meant to cut deep. “Why would you want me to try if it meant—”

“I didn’t _know_ , Sansa!” Jon interrupts, his own voice splitting out as if she cut it from him before he catches it and pulls himself back together. “I didn’t know it would happen. I’ve only ever had Ghost, I see what he sees and feel what he feels… I didn’t think it would… I’m _sorry_. I didn’t know.”

Sansa blows out a breath, her eyes hard and wet, her chest shifting, too fast, too uneven. “ _Ramsay_ —” she cuts off, swallows, curls her fingers in Ghost’s fur. “I am more than what happened to me, Jon. More than my parts, more than what he _did._ ”

Jon swallows, his thighs ache. A scream sits bloody and bitter and copper-bright at the back of his throat. He thinks of six swords, six scars and wonders how she’s still moving while he’s… he’s…

“I know you are.”

Sansa stares at him, eyes shifting over his face like she can find cracks, find a lie, find an untruth and peel it free.

“I want him _dead_.”

Jon hung his men. Strung them up all right and proper, just like he was supposed to. But he can’t help but wonder what this Sansa Stark would do if given the same opportunity.

“I know—”

There’s a knock on the door, Brienne’s voice floating through. “Lady Sansa?”

Sansa’s eyes close, pulling in a breath, Jon watches and wonders at women, at how her spine straightens, how her face changes; can’t help but think of Ygritte, _women see more blood than boys._

“Yes, I’m here, Lady Brienne, just a moment.”

When her eyes open, Jon wants to step forward and offer her some comfort, wants to reassure her, wants to do _something_ other than being stuck to his spot, like his limbs have loosened, slipped free of their joints.

He wonders if Sansa would lend him her stitches.

“This room is _boiling_ , Jon,” she says suddenly, turning for the door. “I think you’re melting Ghost out of it. No wonder he came to me this morning, open a window or something.”

When the door shuts, Jon stares at the fire, at the crackling flames he’d just stoked, down at his fingers, blue-tipped beneath the nails.

But the dead march, and whatever Jon knows, he knows he is not _that._ So he pulls on his layers, pulls on his armours, and does his duty.

Because what else can he do? There are castles to fix, Wildlings to sort, men and boys to cloak in Black whether his sworn brothers like it or not.

And his grave is already covered in fresh snow.

 

                 The day passes, Tormund rides in from the Wildling camps with the numbers and names of those willing to take the Vow, willing to train and fight and re-arm the broken castles that line the Wall.

Jon names the most seasoned men to command, gives them ten trained men and a host of Wildlings to train beneath them, boys mostly, barely old enough to hold swords.

Tormund sits at his side, pressed thigh to shoulder, Jon feels his eyes on him, more than necessary, but he can’t bring himself to linger, his mind caught like a hangnail he’s worrying loose with his teeth: the Wall, Tormund’s fingers, the bruise-print of his thumb—

Tormund’s hand, unspooling him, inch by inch.

 

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

                He wakes _bruised_.

Wakes an old man creaking from his bed, burdened-boned and cold at his edges. He washes in lukewarm water in front of his fire, dresses and pulls on layers like armour, his teeth chattering, his hands fumbling.

He swears there’s skin and blood beneath his nails but no matter how many times he looks, there’s nothing there.

 

 

 

 

                Jon watches Tormund move, the rough, thick-beaten metal of his Wildling sword, inelegant and crude and just as deadly as any fine-forged blade at Castle Black. Swung from a thick arm, moved in an arc by bunching, shifting muscles to meet the blow of Lady Brienne’s sword.

He finds it sits odd on his tongue, _Lady Brienne._ She’s a Ser, _should_ be a ser— should have the same honour on her name as any man pledged by honour and bound by sword. She’s good, better than any man Jon’s met, can’t imagine he would come out of a battle with her without another scar, if he came out at all.

They clash and part, swing and shove in and away from each other like two giants upheaving the earth; he swears some blows should have broken bone.

There is a difference though, watching it from upper level, looking down onto the courtyard, a difference in the way the two meet each other, one trained and knowing each form, each foothold, each angle to tilt a sword— while the other laughs and grins even when he’s knocked off his feet.

Tormund fights like his sword: rough, thick-beaten, inelegant and crude.

Lady Brienne wins, her sword at Tormund’s throat, but his grin is wide and his laughter is huffs of white air from his mouth. “What a fuckin’ woman you are!”

Brienne’s lips curl up, just at the edges before she rights herself, extending a hand and helping Tormund up.

“Good,” she says, a little breathless but nothing less than a perfect knight. “We should do that again.”

Tormund laughs again, clapping her on the shoulder, jolting her forward a little and laughing again at the face she pulls at him.

“You look like father.”

Jon _doesn’t_ jump, but he straightens, turning to look at Sansa, standing just at the edge of the upper-level walkway, near enough to the edge that he wonders how long she was watching him.

Jon knows he does, has known it since he was a child and an offence to a mother… Lady Catelyn couldn’t bear to look at him. A half-blessing, half-curse to carry _Stark_ so boldly in his face.

He wonders if Catelyn every realised that as soon as she bore Robb, _Stark_ became red hair just as much as it had been black.

Robb was the true son, _King of the North. The Young Wolf._

Jon was—

An offence to a mother.

“I thought you were Catelyn,” he says, meeting her eyes. “When I first saw you.”

Sansa’s eyes change, shift colours like the streams in Winterfell in his memories, cool and dark, but bright and clear. She says nothing and it falls silent between them. “I thought you were a ghost,” she says so quietly it’s nearly a whisper. “I saw you all so many times in—”

The dreams sit at the back of his tongue like copper, at the corners of his eyes like they’re still salt-crusted from tears when he woke.

_A laugh, an ache in his wrists, a scream caught in his throat._

Sansa watches him, Jon doesn’t know what to say.

_You know nothing, Jon Snow._

She searches his face and Jon wonders if she felt it too, _feels_ it too, wonders if she had the same dreams he did, or if she felt six blades sinking into her body—

If she knows now, what it’s like to feel your heart restart.

Sansa looks away first, and when she turns away, her hand rests on the wood railing, pale and long-fingered, with red, rubbed-raw mark around her wrist.

He wonders if she dreamt at all, or if Jon snuck into her mind like a thief and stole things he shouldn’t ever know.

He knows they’ll have to talk about it, have to deal with it, have to figure out some way to stop the leak of their edges… but he isn’t sure either one of them knows how to even speak it out loud.

_I am more than my parts._

Looking away and down into the courtyard, Jon finds Tormund already looking up, shrugging that thick Wilding coat back on, eyes tilted up towards Jon.

He has no idea what’s in them, no idea what to make of Tormund’s face. And more than that, if he _wants_ to make anything of the look in Tormund’s eyes, that dark one that’s half threat, half promise.

Lady Brienne returns, her squire in tow, pushing him towards Tormund with a short order, _it’s his turn now._

“There’s been a lot of stories about you, you know,” Sansa says quietly, barely a question at all, more statement and fact.

“Is there?” Jon mutters, watching Tormund turn away, his eyes flicking back up only once as he peels right back down to one layer, something in his eye, right in the corner of his mouth, quirked, teasing, a tilt of his head as he picks up his sword.

“Strange ones, true ones, ridiculous ones.”

Jon tears his eyes away, glancing at Sansa and half expecting her next words to be _you’re a dead boy, Jon Snow._

“You’ve let in thousands of Wildlings, there are some Northern houses you hate you for it. Most, actually.”

“I know, I knew it when I did it, too. I don’t _care_ what the North has to say, Sansa, there are more important things than Northern Lords sitting in their keeps, drinking and whining like they have any clue of what’s coming.”

“The Dead?” At his frown, Sansa shrugs, something so unlike the girl he knew that it jars his mind, just a little. “There are stories everywhere, Jon. In the capital it was little birds whispering, but here…more like ravens, I think.”

Jon thinks there must be a story there too. Another ghost, maybe.

“Ravens,” he mutters, looking up at the sky.

Sansa shakes her head, an odd smile, sitting just in the corner of her mouth. “They like to _squawk_. You remember Maester Luwin’s raven, always crying for corn? There are many lords here like that, latching onto a word or an idea, squawking it endlessly like this time they might be heard.”

“And they were squawking about me? I think I’m nearly flattered.”

Sansa smiles, quick and sudden, gone in a blink, though it lingers in her eyes. “You should be. Ned Starks bastard son, Lord Commander, The Young Wolf’s brother—they’re all trying to figure out what to make of you.”

“I’m just a man of the Watch, Sansa. What I do with the watchtowers and castles given to us is Watch business, not theirs.”

Sansa laughs, but it’s not humour. “ _Jon._ That’s not how this works. You’re a boy to them, a dead king’s brother, a dead warden’s son… you let Wildlings cross the wall, they make that their business.”

“Then let them come and see, I’ll show them what’s north of the Wall. Let them squawk about the dead instead.”

“The Bolton’s have Winterfell, Jon, aren’t you even a little upset by that?”

Jon looks away, out over the courtyard, watching the men and boys train, watching Tormund smack the flat of his blade against Podrick’s back.

“Don’t you want to go home?”

 _Home,_ Jon thinks, and wonders if Sansa realises how pretty a picture she paints with her words. How easily she’s fallen back into his life and claimed him for her own. Brother, Stark, _home._

As if she forgot that Jon was the first to leave, black-cloaked and riding north with Catelyn Stark’s last words in his ears like sharp silver spurs to edge his horse on. _I want you to leave—_

“What would you like me to do, Sansa? Break every oath of the Watch and march them all south to Winterfell? Abandon the Wall and let the dead break through? I swore an oath—”

She scoffs. “That you already broke by letting Wildlings through—”

 _And died for it,_ he thinks. _I can show you my grave, a little hollow marker, already covered with snow._

“Why are you willing to fight for them and not for Winterfell?”

“It’s not ab—” he starts, but he’s cut off by one of the newly sworn-in Wildling boys, who nods awkwardly at them both, mumbling about being sent to fetch him.

“There’s a problem in the armoury, Lord Commander…”

Sansa’s jaw tightens, her eyes going cold as she looks back out over the yard, watching the training and ignoring Jon’s eye as he sighs, turning to leave.

“We’ll talk later, alright?”

Sansa says nothing, Jon hesitates, only for a moment, before he turns to go; the cold lit up with metallic clangs that follow him through Castle Black and across the grounds like a mockery of a war waiting.

 

 

                _Don’t you want to go home?_

Sansa’s words linger in his mind, chase him through hallways and across Castle Black, through his duties and his thoughts, chasing him like the cold wind picking up as night falls.

 _I should,_ he thinks, _I should want to go home. To be Jon Stark. To Robb’s brother. I should want Winterfell._

But he isn’t sure what he’s feeling is his own. If he isn’t tinted in Sansa’s wants like she smudged him in her own bruises; left him with the ache of her pains and wants and revenges.

Winterfell lingers in his mind, its ramparts defaced by flayed-man banners.

Does he want Winterfell back? Or is it just that Sansa wants it enough for both of them?

He isn’t sure he has an answer, no matter how long he stares into the fire. Can’t help but wonder if the Red Woman would see anything more, if she could offer him some truth, found flickering in flame.

Jon feels sleep clawing at him, but he’s afraid to close his eyes, afraid to steal a girl’s memories, afraid to send her any of his own.

Afraid that as soon as he closes his eyes, _home_ will be a thing lingering in nightmares. Home turned into hollow hallways and bloody banners and a cold wind that’s really just one girl’s cries.

A thousand nightmares, all lingering behind his eyelids.

It’s bitter cold, but Jon pulls on another cloak and slips from his rooms; climbs the Wall and sends off the boy on watch. The boy looks half frozen and so grateful it almost makes Jon laugh as he all but flies back towards the ground and the castle’s warmth.

It’s pitch black over the top of the Wall, only the moonlight to light the tips of the trees into an inky black mass, the bottom of the Wall no more than a seething black shadow, a threatening plummet, an icy descent.

The torchlight flickers in the wind, the faint glow along the top ridge of the next watchpoint, a small flame in the dark.

There’s a creak behind him, a thud of footsteps. Jon looks back over his shoulder, though he somehow knows who it is before he looks; Tormund takes the last stair up to the raised watchpoint, his breath puffing white in front of his mouth in the glow of the torches.

“I thought you went back to camp.”

“Drinking. Saw the Red Woman,” Tormund mutters, moving to Jon’s side and putting his forearms on the wooden railing of the watch post. “Saw you climb the Wall.”

_The Red Woman?_

“What’d she want?”

“Don’t know, told her to fuck off,” Tormund grins in the dark and Jon laughs, a short, white-cloud of it falling from his mouth as Tormund turns to face him, straightening and leaning his back against the railing.

He can’t help but think of the other day, Tormund’s fingers on his neck—

“You going to war for her, boy?”

He knows who the _her_ is without asking, and as soon as the words fall from Tormund’s mouth, Jon finds them truer a thing than the hollow pulsing of Jon’s own heart.

 _Yes,_ he thinks. _I’m going to kill Ramsay Bolton and let my wolf eat him whole._

 “It’s just a castle,” he lies, because Winterfell is not just stone and brick and mortar. Winterfell is _Stark_ and Stark is _Winterfell._

“I said for _her_ , little crow, not for some castle.”

Jon thinks about his dreams, about the bruise feeling on his thighs, about a cruel boy and a crueler bastard tangling his hands in red hair.

 _I have dreams,_ he thinks, _stories that are not stories fit for daylight. Or firelight. Or any light._

“I can’t— I don’t—”

Tormund’s eyes shift over his face; Jon wants to ask, wants to know, _what do you see when you look at me? Jon Snow, Lord Commander, Wildling-lover, Undead Boy—_

But he doesn’t.

“I can’t ask them to fight for me.”

Tormund laughs then, a sudden burst of it that breaks the cold quiet wide. He reaches up, his hand cool but wide on the nape of Jon’s neck, gripping on. “You _are_ a stupid, fuckin’ pretty thing aren’t you?”

Jon tries to pull away, but Tormund’s hand tightens, holding him in place like an animal caught by the scruff. “You’re not alone, you know that, don’t you, boy?”

When his thumb pushes against Jon’s jaw, it makes his body tense and boneless, all at once. Jon feels his heart stutter, trip to life. It’s harder than he expects to stay standing.

“There’s something wrong with me,” Jon exhales, it slips from his mouth, hollowed, nearly a whine that reminds him of Ghost, some inhuman part of himself, climbing out of his stomach.

Tormund says nothing, but his thumb presses harder, harder, hard enough to bruise, really bruise, this time.

Something spills inside of his stomach, all rolling heat.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Tormund’s voice rolls out of his chest, sinks into Jon’s and it’s—

It’s _something_ _—_

That makes Jon shiver, makes his edges curl up like his toes in his boots; his body, a stretched-thin skin of a drum, reverberating at Tormund’s touch.

 _I am more than my parts,_ Sansa had said.

_I am more than my parts._

Jon can’t help but think of the aches in his dreams, the phantom bruise of his thighs and knows that while Sansa feels every _inch_ of her body, Jon— Jon feels _none_ of his.

He feels _muted._

An echo filled up with everyone else’s words and feelings and thoughts _._

Struck dumb and deaf and blind and no more than some body stumbling in the dark, a boy moving through motions, removed from his limbs, gathering pieces of himself like he loses them daily, a dead boy leaving a trail from a little hollow grave in the snow.

 “I have a son, you know?” Tormund starts, his voice gruff and quiet. “I _had_ one, he died, years ago now… didn’t find his body in time, either. My youngest daughter had nightmares for years after, ‘cause sometimes the dead— sometimes they come back home, you know, dying memories or some fuckin’ sick joke of the Gods, who fuckin’ knows.”

Jon opens his mouth, but Tormund makes a noise in his throat and there’s something in his eyes, something caught in the black of his pupil, in the nails that just _press_ a little against the nape of Jon’s neck—

“The nightmares were terrible fuckin’ things, screaming her head off, it took a while to figure out how to calm her down.”

“I—”

Tormund shakes his head, his hand tightening, tugging forward on Jon’s neck enough to make him stumble. “You’re alive, little crow, you’re not another dead boy.”

But he doesn’t get a chance to answer, barely a chance to _blink_ — before Tormund’s hand tightens, his other hand gripping into his cloak and he’s being shoved backwards, stumbling and gasping a shock of cold air as his back smacks into wood wall behind him with Tormund bearing down over him.

“Tor—”

It’s all he gets out before Tormund is pushing his body against Jon’s, loses the rest to the air leaving his lungs, jolted from his body; a punched out feeling that steals his thoughts, compresses them into an empty belly, a constricted chest; Tormund’s weight and body and muscle bearing down on him.

“What are you—”

“Shut up,” Tormund grunts roughly, a vibration of a pitching growl that sinks from his chest into Jon’s, pressed from chest to belly to thighs… “An’ just breathe.”

“I _can’t_ ,” Jon gasps, but he can, a slow, tight inhale that he feels filling up his lungs bottom to top, feels every inch of his body, every pressed inch, every contained corner.

“You can.”

He can’t see Tormund’s face, his face pressed against his chest; can feel the soft of Tormund’s furs and skins against his cheeks as he presses Jon harder into the wood hut behind them. Jon pulls in a breath, struggles to fill his lungs as Tormund reaches up and grips the edge of the wooden wall above them, leaning harder into Jon, hard enough that his next breath is strained and gasping and—

Jon tenses, some animal instinct to throw the weight off, but Tormund’s hand slides to the side of his neck and cups it; his chest rumbling, some low roll of words that Jon can’t focus on, too caught in his own pulse, in the burning weight of Tormund’s body against his, in the need for more air—

_Nice an’ slow now—_

He hears it, distantly, feels his body sink into Tormund’s as his muscles ease, as he takes slow, deep breaths, stretching his lungs out against the weight holding him in place.

He’s always been aware of Tormund being bigger than him, but pressed up against each other, _pinned_ by the other man’s body; taller, thicker, broader, and—

Keeping him caught and contained and feeling every _inch_ of his own body.

 _There you go, Jon._ The words roll in the distance like low thunder. _That’s it._

Jon pulls in breaths, has to focus on each one, has to feel each one fill his lungs from bottom to top. Feels each breath slide out, the slow deflation of his lungs, leaves him empty, so empty—

 That he has to make the choice to fill his lungs again, feels the burn, the empty ache of his chest, has to pull in air, has to will his chest to expand against the weight of Tormund’s body pinning him down.

It’s—

_Something._

Trips his heart and his pulse and makes his heart pound against Tormund's palm, as wild as any war drum, but—

He pulls in air and lets it ease out on every low-rolling word slipping from Tormund’s mouth and into Jon’s ears. _Breathe, little crow, that’s it._

 

 _I am more than my parts,_ Jon thinks.

 

And pulls in another breath.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trying to balance the humour of Tormund with his more serious moments, because I think they sort of stole some of his weight in the last season, as much as I thought Briemund was funny, I did miss the Tormund that we saw before that became the focus of his story.
> 
> I know this chapter was pretty heavy with Jon and Sansa, but I think it's important to establish Jon's mindset at the moment and how he works his way out of the that, with help from Tormund, of course. ;)
> 
>  
> 
> Hope you enjoyed it, let me know what you think!


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